Drones with 10-kg payloads were used by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to AK-47 rifles, counterfeit currency and narcotics at Tarn Taran. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones are among the major growing technologies that have beneficial applications in security and other logistical employment, but at the same time, they are being misused by terrorists and smugglers.

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, September 23

The ex-servicemen wing of the SAD on Monday asked the Punjab Government to immediately stop the “exploitation” of ex-servicemen and pay them remunerative salaries on the basis of the Haryana government’s pattern.

In a statement here, SAD ex-servicemen wing president Gurjinder Singh Sidhu said it was shocking that PESCO (Punjab Ex-Servicemen Settlement Corporation) was exploiting ex-servicemen by taking huge amounts from the government as well as private players, but giving them a pittance as salary.

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uthorities on Friday sounded a high alert in Jammu province.

“Air bases and military installations in Jammu have been asked to remain in every ready mode with additional deployment troops on borders and sensitive locations,” an official told Greater Kashmir.

“Jammu Air Force station put on ultra alert since morning with drones hovering over and around air force station and Jammu’s only civil airport,” said a source.

He added that many battalions of paramilitary forces have been deployed in Kishtwar, Bhaderwah, Doda, Banihal and Ramban areas of Jammu in addition to extra deployed of Army and Border Security Force at the International Border (IB) and Line of Control (LoC).

“Romeo, Delta and Uniform forces of Rashtriya Rifles and other regular units of Army deployed on Line of Control and hinterland have been asked to be prepared for any situation,” the source maintained.

Shyam Sood

Rajouri, July 30

Within 24 hours of killing of a 10-day-old baby in mortar shelling from Pakistan in Poonch district, a soldier attained martyrdom in a skirmish along the Line of Control (LoC) in the Sunderbani sector in Rajouri district on Tuesday.

The soldier has been identified as Naik Krishan Lal (34), who was a resident of Ghagriyal in Jammu district. The soldier is survived by his wife Shashi Devi.

Defence sources said the Indian Army retaliated strongly, killing 2 Pakistani soldiers besides inflicting an extensive loss on infrastructure across the border.

In a tweet, Northern Command chief Lt Gen Ranbir Singh and all ranks saluted the supreme sacrifice of Naik Krishan Lal and offered their deepest condolences to the martyr’s family. “The Pakistan army resorted to unprovoked ceasefire violation along the LoC in the Sunderbani sector which was retaliated befittingly by the Indian Army,” said the PRO, defence.

“A heavy damage to Pakistan posts and casualties have been inflicted by our troops,” said Lt Col Davender Anand, PRO, defence.

On July 22, Rifleman Mohammad Atif Sahfi Alam Khan of Gujarat had attained martyrdom in the Sunderbani sector.

For the last two or three weeks, the Pakistan army has been targeting Indian forward posts and civil areas, injuring border residents and damaging houses, in Rajouri and Poonch districts.

There are moments in history that define a nation, its resolve, its character. Kargil Vijay Diwas, July 26, stands out. As India pays tributes to soldiers who drove out enemy forces and reclaimed Kargil heights 20 years ago, it is also a time to reflect on the mounting challenges. Like Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ‘glaring admission’, as New Delhi described it, a couple of days ago that there were ‘30,000 to 40,000 armed people’ in his country ‘who have been trained to fight in some part of Afghanistan or Kashmir’. India has demanded ‘credible and irreversible action’ against terror groups, but what exactly was Khan alluding to? With the FATF breathing down its neck, possibly a message that considering how far Pakistan has come on the terror highway, expecting it to retrace steps while dangling the stick won’t work.

On his return after his visit to the US, an exultant Pakistan premier had this to say: ‘Feels as if I’m coming home after winning the world cup.’ From Khan’s point of view, it’s been nothing short of a diplomatic coup by managing to regain a foothold in Washington, and staring at the opportunity to play its hand on the Afghanistan table considering Donald Trump’s desperation to exit the war-torn country. Twenty years after Kargil, a moment of truth again for India. Something spelled out abundantly while paying tributes to the bravehearts. In Parliament, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh minced no words: ‘Our neighbouring country (Pakistan) cannot fight a full-fledged war or a limited war with India. It is fighting a proxy war.’ And Eastern Army Commander Lt Gen MM Naravane: ‘Some people just don’t learn their lessons; you have to keep teaching them till they learn.’

Any mention of the victory in 1999 should start and end with the daring junior leadership. Here’s the IMA’s tribute: ‘The raw courage of Indian jawans at the tactical level and the swift execution of tri-services military strategy will remain legendary. We rejoice by celebrating the victory in Kargil and renew our resolve to safeguard the honour of the Tricolour.’

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Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 24

To mark the 20th anniversary of Kargil Vijay Diwas, PU Department of Defence and National Security Studies organised a panel discussion on ‘Kargil War: Lessons Learnt ‘ at the ICSSR Seminar Hall here today.

The discussion was organised in collaboration with the Gyan Setu Think Tank and the NCC Army Wing, Panjab University.

Capt Abhimanyu Singh Sindhu, Minister for Finance, Haryana, graced the occasion as chief guest, while Lt Gen PM Bali AVSM, VSM, Chief of Staff, Western Command, Chandimandir, was the guest of honour. Brother of Kargil martyr Vikram Batra, Vishal Batra, and Lt Gen KJ Singh (retd), participated in the event as panellists and Prof Raj Kumar, Vice Chancellor of Panjab University, presided over the event.

Lt Gen KJ Singh (retd) highlighted how the war proved out to be a major folly by Gen Musharraf where he failed to consider the implications of this operation. He also explained how the war was a major challenge as India was facing reduction in international sanctions because of the nuclear tests conducted the previous year.

1999 conflict made it clear that Pak army won’t forget its 1971 humiliation

G Parthasarathy
Former diplomat

PRECISELY two decades ago, three battalions of the Indian Army were tasked with attacking and recapturing Tiger Hill, the highest peak in the Kargil sector. Tiger Hill is located at the commanding heights over the vital highway connecting Srinagar to Ladakh. The operations, which commenced in the last week of May 1999, and were accompanied by a battle for the adjoining peak of Tololing, ended successfully on July 3-4, 1999. Control of the high peaks of Tiger Hill had enabled Pakistani forces to monitor the movement of our forces and disrupt supplies to our troops in Siachen. Coinciding with these events, then Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif paid a hurried visit to Washington and agreed to pull back his forces in Kargil on July 4 — America’s Independence Day!! This happened after then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee had rejected US President Bill Clinton’s offers of mediation.

The Kargil conflict took place when India and Pakistan were under economic pressure from UN-backed sanctions after their nuclear tests in May 1998. The Clinton Administration was determined to ‘curb, roll back and eliminate’ India’s nuclear weapons programme. Pakistan took advantage of the prevailing situation. Infiltration by the Pakistan army into the Kargil sector reportedly commenced around the same time as the N-tests. While the Nawaz Sharif government was initially unaware of these developments, it backed its army’s actions whole-heartedly once General Pervez Musharraf briefed it. Contrary to popular perception, Nawaz was briefed on more than one occasion on what was happening, including at the Pakistan army’s Regional Headquarters in Skardu.

India’s intelligence services learnt of the infiltration only around a year later, resulting in an ugly blame game over who was responsible for a serious intelligence failure. PM Vajpayee had meanwhile decided that one way to deal with America-led international pressure was to try and make peace with Pakistan. It was decided that as a ‘grand gesture’, Vajpayee would visit Pakistan by bus to inaugurate the Lahore-Delhi bus service. Vajpayee was unaware of what was happening across the Line of Control in Kargil when he arrived in Lahore. Arriving in Islamabad a few months before Vajpayee’s visit, I found the atmosphere marked by Pakistani duplicity. Nawaz’s close aides such as Information Minister Mushahid Hussain were inciting Sikh pilgrims from across the world, even as Mushahid and the Punjab Governor were in touch with Lashkar-e-Taiba leader Hafiz Saeed.

Vajpayee, who was and remains widely respected in Pakistan, was warmly received. The Service Chiefs did not receive him on arrival, but called on him at the Governor’s residence in Lahore, where he was staying. He delivered a masterly speech at a civic reception in Lahore, which moved the audience. The Pakistan military and significant sections of its political establishment appeared to think otherwise. The intentions of the Pakistan establishment were evident during Vajpayee’s visit, even in negotiations for finalising the Joint Declaration. Vivek Katju, who then headed the Pakistan Division, handled these negotiations firmly and skilfully. There was also no respite from terrorist strikes in J&K in the months preceding and following Vajpayee’s visit.

The Indian Army, particularly its young officers and jawans, deserve the nation’s gratitude for the valour they showed in battle after climbing high peaks in Kargil. Eleven years later, Pakistan acknowledged that 453 of its soldiers were killed in the conflict. They could afford to obfuscate as the soldiers killed were largely Shias from Gilgit-Baltistan. Indian casualties were 527 killed and 1,363 wounded.

Vajpayee visited the Army operations room in the third week of May 1999 for a briefing by the Army Chief, General VP Malik, which I attended. The Army Chief gave a detailed account of Pakistani infiltration and assured Vajpayee that the Army would throw out all intruders. General Malik alluded to the need for air support, a proposal Vajpayee accepted the same day, with the condition that IAF aircraft should not cross the LoC.

I was told to return immediately to Islamabad as airstrikes were commencing the next morning. The IAF was confident that its MiG-29s and Mirage 2000s could take on the PAF, equipped with American F-16s. The PAF stayed away from coming too close to the LoC. Two IAF aircraft were brought down by Pakistani surface-to-air missiles: a MiG-21F piloted by Squadron Leader Ajay Ahuja, who lost his life, and a MiG-27L piloted by Flight Lieutenant Nachiketa, who was captured. The Pakistanis sought to play their usual games by arranging a huge media event to showcase their ‘generosity’ during a conflict, offering to release Nachiketa in my presence at the Foreign Office. I refused to attend the proposed ‘release’ function, describing it as a ‘media spectacle’ demeaning the dignity of an IAF officer captured in combat. The International Red Cross then handed Nachiketa over to us inside the Indian High Commission the same evening.

The Kargil conflict brought home many hard truths for us. The Pakistan army, which rules the country, is not going to forget its 1971 humiliation. It will try and take some form of revenge, whenever it can. Enmity towards India is essential for its very existence and for it to continue as de facto ruler of the country. With Vajpayee’s approval, we continued issuing visas to Pakistanis liberally during the Kargil conflict. The Lahore Bus Service and the Samjhauta Express functioned normally. While Pakistanis were being misled by screams of imminent victory and azadi for Kashmiris, calm and determined Indians were going about their normal lives.

Let us mark the 20th anniversary of the Kargil conflict soberly and appropriately, with national tributes to General VP Malik and his brave soldiers, as also to Air Chief Marshal Anil Yashwant Tipnis, the fighter pilots and others in the IAF.

The recent heroin haul in Amritsar has once against put the spotlight on Pakistan’s continual pushing of narcotics into the country. It is as much an economic and strategic issue as it is a societal concern

The drug problem in Punjab is not about drugs. It is about Pakistan’s ‘war of a thousand cuts’ against India. It is about national security, writes Ajai Sahni 

532 kg of heroin, worth an estimated Rs 2,700 crore, and another 52 kg of assorted narcotics, in a single seizure in Punjab — the largest recovery of drugs ever in India. This massive payload came unmolested across the Attari border, despite the fact that the Pakistani side has sophisticated truck scanners for the detection of contraband — bags of heroin would stand out like a sore thumb in a consignment of salt.

Read also: 

• Red flags from Attari heroin seizure 
• Fallout of drugs: A nation compromised
  

The seizure of this enormous consignment of drugs has provoked the usual and contemptible political circus in the State, sparking partisan attacks on the present regime by its predecessor. Ironically, Punjab saw a decade of neglect and steadily worsening indices under the Akalis. The Badal government had, in fact, told the Punjab & Haryana High Court in 2009 that 75 per cent of Punjab’s youth and 65 per cent of all families had been affected by drug addiction; and that 30 per cent of all inmates in Punjab’s jails were accused under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act.

Partisan political conflict over the drug trade, mutual acrimony and a focus on smuggling networks and the contraband itself, detract from an essential and far more important reality that has largely been ignored: the drug problem in Punjab is not about drugs. It is about Pakistan’s ‘war of a thousand cuts’ against India. It is about national security.

More than 717 kg of heroin have already been recovered by authorities in Punjab in the current year, in addition to 285 kg of opium, 18,702 kg of poppy husk (a major source of a range of opiates), and significant quantities of other drugs. The year 2018 saw the recovery of 384 kg of heroin, 391 kg of opium, and 40,598 kg of poppy husk, in addition to other drugs. Similarly, in 2017, 192 kg of heroin, 558 kg of opium and 42,631 kg of poppy husk, among other drugs, were seized in Punjab. Normally, seizures reflect a very small fraction of the drugs in circulation, and the narcotic flows across the border into Punjab would be many multiples of these recoveries. At such a scale, the injection of drugs into the State is no less than an act of war, a lethal assault against the people of Punjab. On its own, this may still have been dismissed as criminal activity at a gigantic scale, but what we have here is the use of narcotics in a broader strategy of covert and unrestricted warfare. Narcotics are only one instrumentality that is being deployed by Pakistan against Punjab — and, indeed, India — with terrorism and financial instruments such as fake Indian currency notes (FICN) combining to devastating effect in the past, and with tremendous potential to inflict harm in the present and future.

These are not unconnected streams, but are components of an integrated, planned and sustained strategy of attrition. At the peak of Khalistani terrorism in Punjab, the entire drug trade was controlled or facilitated by the various terrorist groups that dominated the border areas, even as the principal flows from Afghanistan through Pakistan and across the border into India were managed by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence. After the collapse of terrorism in Punjab, Afghan opium continued to be processed in factories in Pakistan and actively pushed across the border into Punjab in a conscious strategy to continue with Islamabad’s ‘war by other means’ against India.

The terrorism-narcotics linkage, as well as the ISI’s not-so-hidden hand, shows up in a number of joint seizures of drugs, weapons and, in some cases, FICN. For instance, in a succession of interlinked cases between December 2018 and May 2019, drugs and weapons, including pistols and grenades, were transferred from Pakistan to receivers in Punjab. One of the telephonic contacts in Pakistan was traced back to Harmeet Singh aka PhD, ‘chief’ of the Khalistan Liberation Force. Similarly, in May and June 2017, in two related cases, a number of weapons, including AK series assault rifles, an MP-9 modified rifle, several revolvers and pistols, ammunition and quantities of heroin were recovered, and nine persons were arrested. According to the FIRs registered in this cluster of cases, the consignments had been arranged by Lakhbir Singh Rode of the International Sikh Youth Federation and Harmeet Singh aka PhD, both under the ISI’s protection in Pakistan. The transaction was allegedly mediated by Gurjit Singh aka Gurjiwan Singh, a resident of Canada. A stream of such cases, too many to recount here, involving the combined transfer of drugs, FICN, weapons, ammunition and explosives, documents these flows over the years.

Punjab has been targeted from multiple directions, and not just across its own border with Pakistan, with drug and weapons’ flows coming from Gujarat, Rajasthan and Jammu & Kashmir as well. It is significant that, in the Attari seizure, one of the two accused is from Handwara in Kashmir.

These complex patterns and linkages are sometimes spoken of as ‘narco-terrorism’, but what we are witnessing is much worse, and infinitely more dangerous. Narco-terrorism often refers to terrorist groups that engage in drug trafficking activity to fund their operations. This is not the case with the Pakistan-based Khalistanis, who are fully supported by the Pakistani state. And while Pakistan uses drug revenues to bolster its terrorist campaigns in both India and Afghanistan, there is no necessary dependence here. Pakistan’s malfeasance would continue with or without drugs, part of its insidious strategy of protracted and unrestricted warfare against its neighbours.

Despite the very long tradition of, and substantial literature on, these patterns of war, the Indian strategic community, and certainly the country’s political executive, remain largely unfamiliar with their principles and risks. This is “warfare that transcends all boundaries and limits”, and that breaks down the distinctions between military and civilian spaces, instruments, technologies and methods. While some of these instruments can be identified, there are a range of others that meld seamlessly into the uncertainties and disorders of our time, and the insidious and coordinated energies behind these are difficult to discover and counter.

Drugs, terrorism, radicalisation, fake news, social media manipulation, disruptive conspiracies such as the ‘sacrilege’ cases – these are already part of the complex our adversaries visibly employ to bring ruination to the people of Punjab. There are other instrumentalities that an alert administration will need to uncover and respond to.

Crucially, it is now necessary to recognise this insidious way of war, and to understand that the networks of collaborators within Punjab are no less dangerous than terrorists with bombs and bullets. Unfortunately, their impact and role in devastating the State remain largely unacknowledged. Tens of thousands of petty smugglers have, no doubt, been arrested over the past years (6,622 already arrested this year; 13,959 in 2018). But the ‘big fish’, the masters of the game, remain beyond the reach of enforcement agencies. In 2014, K.P.S. Gill wrote, “powerful political patrons and controllers of the drug trade in the State have remained outside the ambit of state reprisals.” This remains the case even today. This is not just Punjab’s problem. It is a national crisis.

— The writer is executive director Institute for Conflict Management